“So as the ship leaves the dock, I expect people to be sailing with us.”

What a trip

McAnuff’s seagoing metaphor might be more apt than it seems for a story about two landlubbers: Pickett, as he and McAnuff chat at the Playhouse during a rehearsal break, describes wine as “a bottomless ocean of mystery.”

Not only that, but “Sideways” involves enough of it to float an ocean liner. And as these guys are drinking, their lives just keep on sinking.

“Sideways” follows longtime, 40-ish buddies and oenophiles Miles (played by Patrick Breen of Broadway’s “The Normal Heart” and “Next Fall”) and Jack (Sean Allan Krill of off-Broadway’s “Hit the Wall”), as they hit the road to live it up before Jack’s impending wedding.

Things get complicated when the arrive in the Santa Ynez Valley and become involved with another pair of friends, Terra (UC San Diego MFA grad Zöe Chao of the Playhouse’s “Surf Report”) and Maya (Nadia Bowers, who has La Jolla credits for “The Farnsworth Invention” and “Tartuffe”).

At a rehearsal on one recent weekday afternoon, in a space outfitted with multiple makeshift bars lined with wine bottles, the cast is working through scenes that give a sense of how this quartet’s relationships play out. (Spoiler alert: not very neatly.)

Miles — a divorced English teacher and thwarted writer from San Diego — is sharing a tender moment with Maya when he lets on that Jack (a B-list TV actor) is soon to be married. Appalled, she threatens to tell the oblivious Terra, and suggests to Miles that she was more or less bribed (with wine) to spend time with him in the first place.

When Jack arrives, Miles slugs him ­— then scolds his friend for making such a mess.

“I can’t stand the sight of blood,” he bleats — just one indication of the character’s profound self-involvement.

Pickett himself is a divorced writer and wine aficionado from San Diego, and in the original novel, Miles tells the story in the first person. “Sideways” may not be Pickett’s own story, exactly, but he acknowledges there’s plenty of himself in the piece.

Before he got to UC San Diego, though, the writer-to-be’s involvement with the written word was largely limited to tossing it on people’s porches.

“When I was 13 years old, I delivered your paper,” he says of the route he worked as a San Diego Union carrier in his family’s Clairemont neighborhood.

This was circa the early ’70s; Pickett’s father was an Air Force veteran turned businessman, and his mother was a registered nurse. He had two brothers.

Around that same time, Pickett also was a hotshot junior golfer ­— although he was soon to give up that pursuit and get “pretty heavy into surfing,” he recalls.

“But then, when I got into (UC San Diego), my life changed,” he says. “I really wasn’t a budding artist or intellectual. (But) at this place, I was exposed to so many things — I mean, brilliant minds.”